Vray Caramel Material

[luis_alcala]

Hello everyone,

Back here for some knowledge. Just wanted to see if anyone had some guidance on how to built the caramel material in this picture. Trying to get into some still life practice and wanted to tackle this material first. Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

[fixeighted]

I did a quick test here, of some sort of caramel and used transluscency, playing with the parameters, so you give that a go and see where it leads you
You can see from the shader that it's not complex but can certainly be made better depending on preference.
SSS is probably good also but I didn't have time to try today
The better the mesh you're using then the easier it is to see what is working and what is not.

[luis_alcala]

Hello Fixeighted,

Thanks for taking the time to look at this and share the knowledge. I was a little confused at first since the shader attributes looked different from mine. Quickly realized it was Vray for Max jajaja. Sorry, kid has not been sleeping much. Anyway, I see what you did with the material here. Its looking pretty cool. Going to finish setting up my scene and then apply the discovered setting you have here. I would be very interested to see what the Vray Fast SSS2 would produce. Going to work as quickly as I can and post an update. If you or anyone else has anymore input it would be awesome to hear. OK, going to jam on this..

[fixeighted]

Oops, yes I meant to say that I'm on Max but forgot
Same thing really, with shaders, luckily.
SSS I may do tomorrow if I get time.
One thing I did add was bubbles under the surface...they do come across in better renders and add realism.
Also you can add a coat for extra sheen, plus bump of some sort if necessary, all depending on type of caramel I guess.
Grant Warwick did one which you can find online (image) but I don't actually think it's that good as a caramel, or rather, it looked more like fudge imo (a fine line LOL)....I think he used SSS

[luis_alcala]

thats great info. Would be great to see what you can share if you have the time. Currently working on setting up the scene as we speak. Thank you again and hope to hear from you soon.

[luis_alcala]

Sorry it took so long to repost but I was hit with another project for a client. Anyways, this is why I was asking for all the help. Really trying to get better at still life and understanding materials for lookdev. Attached is the image that I am trying to replicate along with what I have currently created in Vray and Maya plus a simulation with PhoenixFD. Its not quite what I want and I am just trying to get as close as possible to the image.

I understand that it will be difficult to match since the environments are different but I would really, really love to get some more help from the community and see what more I can do to improve. Thank you all again for the help. Hope to hear some advice from you all.

[fixeighted]

I did a quick copy and tweaked my previous shader to sort of match the reference. Feel free to slap this on your model and see how it looks
Lighting also naturally adds a lot to the overall look. My setup used an hdri and a couple of coloured plane rim lights
https://www.dropbox.com/s/5czlzw1dwb...20MAT.max?dl=0

EDIT: Sorry, I keep forgetting you're using Maya. If you don't have max to see the material then I can do grabs to show the settings and they should transfer.

[luis_alcala]

Hello fixeighted,

This is really cool to see. Would love to see the settings that you are using for your shader and see how you got to this. Sorry that I dont have 3ds Max. Would you be able to share your settings you used? Another question, did you sim the Caramel as well on top of the apple with the "nuts" using PhoenixFD???

[fixeighted]

Hi...yeah it worked out pretty well. I don't have Phoenix unfortunately, as it's pretty awesome, so used Max's fluids, which I hadn't really looked at before.
I was pleasantly surprised with the outcome....only took me an hour to do this earlier, so all good.
Nuts were just stuck on the apple as colliders.
The quality of the sim is crucial I think, so maybe you could try a smaller grid so it has resolution to get the coverage as in the reference, where all the nuts are covered at least a tiny bit.
You can cheat also, as I did, and hand place some closer to the surface (I collapsed my liquid to a mesh so I could model it for this where useful)

Anyway, here are the settings I used.
It's pretty simple as you can see, so I'm hopeful it'll work with your setup
As I mentioned in an earlier post above, I would toy with maybe scattering some little bubbles also, just for
added break-up sub-surface.

[luis_alcala]

Thanks for sharing this fixeighted. I will givve it a go and see what comes out of it. Great suggestions as well on the other aspects. I will post an update as soon as I have one.

[fixeighted]

No probs. Looking forward to seeing your results

[luis_alcala]

Hey fix quick question, from the screen shots you provided I am assuming you are using a vrayblend material?

[luis_alcala]

Heres a quick update. Took the settings from what you shared and did small tweaks on my shader since I believe you are using Vray 5. Im still on Vray Next. I also used PhoenixFD and the particle shader to add the air bubbles from honey based on some reference images. Its looking more like the image but now i am getting weird artifacts around the nuts and where the liquid meets. I think it might be the liquid geometry is penetrating with the peanuts geometry. What do you all think? Open to suggestions and improvements that can be made.

[fixeighted]

Looking good
I personally would go for fewer bubbles and a few different sizes of them - but they add very much to the detail, whichever way.

The odd darkening around the nuts is likely to be some odd refraction to do with the thickness of the translucency - possibly fixable
but I would ignore that by having the caramel almost always cover the nut pieces, like in the green highlighted ones here.
This is how I imagine making the real thing, by mixing in the nuts, so they would almost certainly all be coated in some caramel.

The blue highlighted ones look acceptable I think, where the caramel wraps them really well, making little dimples.
All my personal choices of course, so both you and others may have a different thinking

One idea for the problematic nuts is to make a separate blend material, with nut as the base and a coat which is the caramel with different settings,
with an edgestex on the caramel so it blends with the surrounding sauce. May/may not work as imagined...

[luis_alcala]

Hey Fixeighted,

Thanks again for taking the time to review this. All comments and suggestions are very welcome and spot on. Going with a similar thinking process. Going to give the suggestions a go. I'm thinking of taking the PhoenixFD simulation and exporting an abc file to the frame im using and doing some sculpting to tweak the problematic areas. Would give me the opportunity to fine tune those areas without having to resim.

Going to also see if i can use the wetmap from phoenix to blend between the nuts and caramel for that extra detailing. I will post when I get an update.

Thank you again for the guidance and patience.